Beast
'The Beast ' is the main antagonist of Over the Garden Wall. He is the monster of the The Unknown, and is feared throughout it. His goal is to catch the brothers, Wirt and Gregory, and turn them into Edelwood trees in order to fuel his lantern. The Beast is voiced by Samuel Ramey. Appearance When in the darkness of the forest, the beast looks like a being with the antlers and white glowing eyes. When in light, he has the faces of the souls he has turned into trees. The Dog which was possesed by the Beast grew many times its original size. It turned black with blue, yellow, yellow-orange, and pink red rings on its eyes in the order listed. Story He has the power to possess other creatures, such as Beatrice's dog shown in the very first episode, and "haunts" the inhabitants of The Unknown, like Adelaide who claims to be following "the dark voices of the Beast." He is the selfproclaimed owner of the woods through which Wirt and Greg wander, as he says to Wirt that Greg is going to be "a part of his forest." The Beast bears an old lantern called the Dark Lantern. It is unknown when the Beast lost this lantern to the Woodsman, but from then on the Beast has haunted the man, eventually making a deal with him to become the lantern bearer. He deceived the Woodsman into believing that his daughter's soul was kept alive inside the lantern, and would keep on living as long as the flame was lit. It's assumed that the Beast stole the Woodsman's daughter's soul. The lantern is kept lit by the oil from Edelwood Trees, a type of tree that forms when the Beast captures the souls of children led astray. For many years the Woodsman has chopped the wood and collected the oil from it without knowing how the trees were created. In the finale, "The Unknown," the Beast finally overpowers the Woodsman in their fight over the lantern. But when Wirt picks it up first, the Beast tries to persuade him into becoming the new lantern bearer instead of fighting him for the lantern, promising him that Greg's soul will live on as the burning flame of the lantern. Wirt rejects his offer, and casually notes that the Beast is so obsessed with the lantern as if it was his own soul captured inside it. When he threatens to blow out the light, the Beast yells "No!", revealing Wirt's suspicions to be true. Wirt leaves the lantern to the Woodsman, who finally caught on to the deception. The Beast tries to manipulate him into killing the boys and get more oil, but the Woodsman turns to face the Beast instead, spinning fast enough to catch a glimpse of his actual form. The Beast is made up of a multitude of faces, not unlike the ones seen on the Edelwood Trees. The Woodsman contemplates for a moment before he opens the lantern and blows out the light, ending the Beast for good. It should be noted that after the Woodsman blew out the lantern, a black turtle(like the one the dog in episode 1 ate) appeared in the lake and the Woodsman's daughter reappeared. This may mean that the daughter consumed a black turtle(or used one to light her lantern) and accidentally became the Beast. that thaw most fans refut this has its more or less implyed the beast corrupted the dog(he corrupted adali and suppsadly others) not the turtal who Auntie Whispers is also seen eat. with no side effects. the duaghter camehome because the beast appears to be made out of the loust souls turned ito trees and they where fride when he died. The Beast sings a song in an opera style while the Woodsman chops wood, as seen in "Songs of the Dark Lantern". Another song sung by the Beast can be heard in Babes in the Woods called "Come Wayward Souls". The Nature of the Beast Over the Garden Wall is a work of art. Its complex yet intuitively understood allegories give us one of the greatest fables ever created for a cartoon, and the viewer can spend weeks obsessing over how every seemingly random thing in it is tied together. This beautiful complexity is done a disservice by the rather two dimensional interpretations people have been giving it; the show and its setting are much more than one kid’s dream picked up by another kid while in a coma, nor is it a LOST type LIMBO or a Minority Report esque “give a fake happy ending to the protagonists who’ve BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME” self contradiction. Over the Garden Wall is much more than that. One such unsatisfying interpretation making the rounds- that the Beast is Satan- is a huge example of the over simplicity of the fan theories shared so far. The Beast may be a liar and a fiend, but he is no way equal to the Abrahamic Satan, the closest similarity seems to be in the choice of voice actor; Samuel Ramney who has had several performances as Mephistopheles in operatic perfomances of Faust. The Beast is the embodiment of resignation; his power was over the hopeless and those too tired to continue. When his would be victims have something to go on for, the Beast cannot claim them; the children were safe during their trip to Adelaide not because of their path, but because they believed their path led somewhere. The kids were imperiled once one of them lost hope in escaping their ordeal. Experiencing hopelessness and the sneering sense of abandon that comes with it caused the dejected to become forfeit to the Beast because hopelessness is what the Beast is. Even his body is a expression of collective dismay. In this the better comparison would be with the supernatural creature the Bøyg from Henrik Ibsen's play Per Gynt. Both antagonists drive their victims to resignation and personal despair in the wilderness. (Where the Beast has the Forrest the Bøyg has the Moorlands) Both vreatures are also generally only shown as dark figures shrouded To dash away hope, the Beast needed to make it foolish. To do this he exerted his influence on the two true sources of succor in the wood: Adelaide of the Wood and the Woodsman. The other denizens of the wood were beyond the Beast’s power for varying reasons: Beatrice wants to help her family, the Teacher and her father were sincerely committed to housing and educating children; the frogs simple-mindedly enjoyed their little civilization as the millionaires were transfixed by their lonely manias; Lorna and the Inn’s people threw themselves into their work to keep thoughts of disorder and absence of meaning at bay while the “people” of Pottsfield are beyond worry or expectation due to having already arrived at their final destination. These motivations grounded the denizens of the Unknown. Adelaide and the Woodsman didn’t have anything to keep them from getting lost; they were drawn into the Beast’s domain because they were completely in the midst of it. They were the threshold that wanderers wandered into, and their actions led to doom, escape or intermediate torture. Adelaide was one threshold. The Beast called to her because she had come to fear the outside, and her fear had grown into reverence. She worshipped the darkness of the night because it seemed to blot out the world outside, leaving her hovel as the last surviving piece of creation. Her body and psyche stifled with decay, her spirit withered by the belief that her time was over, she refused to move on, instead closing herself off to life while clinging to the sterile desire to maintain herself by becoming dependent on those whose independence would be taken from them. Adelaide could have easily gotten assistance from the bluejay family and found a purpose for herself in their companionship if she freely helped them with their curse, but like her sister, Granny Whispers, she did not believe that anyone would take the time to willingly care for her. She had lost hope in humanity. The Beast took that hopelessness and used it to draw travelers deeper into the Unknown’s quagmire. Those who escaped were left deflated and less likely to retain the will needed to continue onrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truthrom the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truth. The Woodsman guided travellers away from the threat he maintained. Unaware of this, he tried his best to take travellers out of the Beast’s domain. He would have taken the brothers if they hadn’t wrecked the mill he used to process cursed wood, but that may have been the first of many blessings in disguise.The only road he knew that assuredly led away from the Beast went through village of the dead, yet another nuance that makes the audience wonder: were those the Woodsman directed escaping the unknown, or were they being sent into the greatest unknown there is -the path into the next life? Unable to wrest control of his lantern from the Woodsman, the Beast used him to harvest his victims and the rest lost in the unending woods. The Beast is the wood; his body is composed of the people who went astray in it and never found their way home. The Woodsman and the Beast became locked in a Sisyphyian struggle; the Woodsman led people out of the woods but he was the one inadvertently causing the worst parts of it to grow. The fuel he collected was consumed in order to create more fuel; this endless search drove him, the Beast and hapless passersby deeper into the quagmire. In order to find a way out of the Unknown, the Woodsman and the brothers he sought to help had to stop fighting it. The Beast was in the lantern because its dim light limited people to what was in plain sight rather than experiencing a as yet unseen wider world filled with more hidden delights and opportunities than there were unseen dangers. By sticking to the known, characters were trapped in self perpetuating loss; for everything now seeable something else was lost to the surrounding darkness, and everything found in the lantern’s ever dwindling dimness could only be utilized to continue a journey that led nowhere. In contrast everything that helped the Brothers was chanced upon, and unlike how the Beast’s guidance moved people to surrender to futility or the status quo, this lack of direction resulted in a thousand little salvations that would have never been discovered had the brothers chosen a to go searching for help. Success came serendipitously. Beatrice saved her family because she abandoned the deal she made to save them; it’s unlikely that Adelaide would have kept her word. The Woodsman was put in the position to refuse burning Greg only because Wirt burned the tree that would have sustained the lantern for a long time. Greg wasn’t looking to travel to Cloud City, but whether that realm was real or not, it gave him the ability to see his brother’s predicament and make a plan which relied on the unseen devotion that Wirt always had under his air of resentment and self doubt. These examples may seem like plot conveniences, but they ashow how there is a subtle cohesion to collective experiences, and no matter how random these experiences are, they still build on each other to shape a person. When the lantern’s light went out, the Woodsman no longer knew where he was going, but this freed him to go down his original path of pathlessness; he returned home not because of having no place else to go, but because the wider world was freed up for him to travel as he sought fit. He was no longer bound to the duty of maintaining the lantern that “helped” him search. He could finally begin again. His daughter being there to welcome him back illustrated the illusion behind being bound to a destiny not of one’s own choosing. The Beast was the last gasps of impudent desperation and the loss of hope. Wirt caught on to this and defeated the Beast by finding his resolve and instilling resolve back into others. When everyone decided to move on and take things as they were without giving up on life and the world around them, the Beast could no longer haunt them or anyone else. With the demise of the Beast the fantasy let itself end; everyone either went home or woke up and dragged themselves back into mundanity. Gallery 640px-Tumblr_neoeeqSivu1suxz6co1_1280.jpg|in light Category:Characters Category:Males Category:Villains